Instant messaging (IM) applications are one of the fastest growing modern-age communication tools. Instant messaging, previously used for entertainment purposes, is steadily propagating onto everyday lives of people and is becoming a seriously efficient form of communication for businesses. The real-time nature of this tool, and its capability of maintaining the lists of all contacts along with their availability statuses organized in categories, have made it an attractive choice to be used for internal as well as external transactions and communications of corporations. The recording of all or some of the conversation by IM is easy, its archival requires not much of memory space, and it paves the way for mounting other accessibility features such as text-to-speech and speech-to-text applications. Making use of such applications also facilitates the conversion of IM conversations to oral communications and vice versa in a customer service environment.
As noted above, Instant Messaging systems provide many user alert features for example alerts for when a contact from the buddy list becomes “Available”, “Unavailable”, “Goes offline”, etc. Being one of the most important features of IM messaging systems, this feature has some shortcomings. For example, all of the notifications for these alerts are sent to the person setting the alerts. The targeted users, whose availability statuses are being checked by the alerting system, are not aware that such alerts are being set on their behalf. Sometimes, it would be useful to alert the user for whom the alert is set, especially if the alert is being set for “Log off” or “Goes offline.” Currently, the targeted user might forget about an important IM session before leaving the IM system. This problem is solved with a two-way alert notification within the IM system.